OFB-11!

Either I'm completely worthless and can't choose the right path, or the game is trolling me. From scouting the surface, I saw cliffs everywhere, no Dragon Utopias, and was glad to find at least one Dragon Utopia, which turned out to be garbage. I built up the Mage Guild, found no control. A day earlier, I captured Conflux, which let me upgrade to Birds, along with an external dwelling of Psychos, but the opponent didn't despair and upgraded to Angels. In the neighboring zone, I found 2 portals. Bad luck number one. Then I moved to a zone with a bunch of promising chests, 8 out of 8 on experience. The opponent, however, went to an unremarkable zone cunningly blocked by cliffs, but such that two Dragon Utopias fit snugly between the cliffs. It was in those that the opponent found the Chalice and the Quest Guard. And I, hoping that one Dragon Utopia put me ahead, engaged in contact, then saw that their stats were higher and armies larger, and I hadn't built control — so I surrendered. Post-mortem revealed there was also a Dimension Door scroll, even without a Mage Guild Altar.
And now what Savitar said — that everyone plays identically on the mirror map — is brilliantly disproven. Moreover, it's hard to say who played more correctly; here one simply got luckier, the other less so. Thanks for the game